‘I’ll have the Post-Pandemic Special, please’

Kamehachi, March 16, 2020.

     Eating is a big deal. You don’t need me to tell you that. We give special names for the times throughout the day when we stop whatever we’re doing to eat: Breakfast! Lunch! Dinner! A big part of every faith centers around eating, all those feasts and fasts. Some folks can’t nibble a breadstick without gravely informing God.
     You could argue that making a fuss about eating is what makes us human. Animals generally gobble nourishment where and when they find it. “Only people actively, regularly, and continuously work on the portioning out of their food,” Margaret Visser writes on the first page of “The Rituals of Dinner.”
     To hint at how exaggerated our regard for eating is, consider the other end of the alimentary tract, briefly: going to the bathroom. No ritual, little lingering, no reviews. We don’t even like to think about it, never mind talk about it. That attitude could work for eating too — humans could consume enough food to get through the day in 60 seconds flat. Think of the time we’d save.
     But we don’t, generally. Eating in restaurants is an even bigger deal. Dining out can be one of the most significant parts of our lives.
     I can’t recall much from 1975. In fact, I remember only one moment: My sister and I, on our first visit to Chicago, in a leather booth, holding back laughter as a waiter in a tuxedo presents us a bowl of greens set in ice.
     “Here at zee Blackhawk, we spin zee sah-lad not wahnce, not tweyes, but sree tahmes!”     What began as a practical necessity for travelers — the stagecoach stops for the night, the innkeeper carves off some mutton and draws a mug of ale — now has assumed magnified importance, ingrained in our lives.
     Chicago, and Illinois, opening restaurants Friday for indoor dining should be a milestone in our civic recovery from COVID-19. V-E Day, Victory in Eating.

To continue reading, click here. 

Maybe this'll help.

    A busy Wednesday—much progress on the book in the morning, then a pleasant social-distanced lunch on my pal Eric's back porch. In the afternoon, an interview for a future column, a quick 30 laps at the Y, and answering emails—is it possible to cheese off BOTH Fox News right wingers AND social justice radicals at the same time? Apparently so (the former didn't like that I seemed not to hold African-Americans responsible for every bad thing that goes on in their lives; the latter didn't like that I would address the topic at all).
     After dinner, this email came in, which was a more polite form of the Foxers. Polite enough to warrant a reply. Perhaps having polished my patter throughout the day, I achieved, I thought, a kind of purity in concision. Besides, it's all I've got.

    The reader, Jim, we'll shield his last name, writes:

     You'll have to forgive me.  I know it's been awhile.  I was glad to see someone finally touch on an area that many of us find very hard to understand.  Before you dismiss me as part of the Fox Nation or a Trump cultist, let me assure you that I am neither.  I do not consider the former to be a legitimate news outlet nor the later to be worthy or competent for the high office he holds.  That does not stop me from being troubled by the fact that there are thousands of young black men killed by other young black men in urban areas across this country every year with very little outrage or demonstrations for change in the black communities that are most affected.  But let just one of these young black men die at the hands of a rouge cop and you have thousands marching in protest wanting to shut down large parts of metropolitan areas and they don't seem overly concerned about the criminal elements that use their protests as a front to loot, trash and try to create anarchy.     

     What is wrong with this picture?

     I was just as appalled at the death of George Floyd as was the rest of the country but I am even more appalled by the shear numbers of senseless deaths that take place in Black Communities across this country every single day.  Most of the time we never even get to know their names.  They disappear from our streets without any fanfare or adoration.  Once in awhile a story will appear for a day or two about a three year old killed by a stray bullet or two cousins killed in the same bloody weekend in Chicago.  But the stories soon fade with no outrage or condemnation or protests for the kind of change that needs to come from within the Black Community.  So hard to understand.

I hope you are well and keeping safe.

  And I replied:    

Steinberg, Neil	7:12 PM (1 minute ago)
to Jim

Good to hear from you again, Jim. You bring up an interesting point. 

Let me restate the issue in a way that could help cut through the clutter and lead, perhaps, to clarity:

Do you expect more from police officers than from gang bangers? Why?

Thanks for writing.

NS

Where’s the outrage? Funny you should ask

Anti-police protest, City Hall, March 28, 2018

     "Where's the outrage?" activist Tio Hardiman asked not once but twice. "Where's the outrage? For this 3-year-old that was killed. The same kind of outrage when George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis. There should be 30, 40, 50,000 people on the streets, right now, shutting down the Black community until we get it right. Black men need to shut down the Black community until we get it right."
     OK, I’ll bite. Can I fit in 10 thoughts? Let’s try.
     1. Did cops kill that 3-year-old too? My hunch is they didn’t. Because the outrage roiling the country is not about the victim, per se, but about living in a nation where a police officer, the representative of law and order, in theory, can leisurely strangle a Black man while his buddies stand guard. That’s what galls, as opposed to the age of the person killed. Though I suppose — I hope — that had the Minneapolis police smothered a toddler, not to give them any ideas, the national outrage would be worse.
     2. That question, “Where’s the outrage?” is a cliche, the half-clever way the Fox Nation sorts and their surrogates — not to point any fingers — try to avoid the admittedly slight risk of being drawn into a sincere conversation about racism. “Where’s the outrage?” is Fox Speak for “Fix it yourself.”
     3. Holding our noses, let’s dive into my spam folder, where the tone used to describe last weekend’s 104 shootings is between a leering chortle and a blatting raspberry.
     “Maybe the credo should be ‘Black Lives Matter — Except in Lawndale, Englewood, Etc.’ Very sad,” begins one, “very sad” being the polite form of Nelson Muntz’s bray of “Ha-ha!”
     4. “Black on Black murders. Horrible,” sighs another. “The media ignore it. Not a peep!”
     Well, Fox News certainly didn’t ignore it — that’s where I saw Hardiman’s interview. They even have a running logo, “Chicago’s Crime Wave.” The killings were the front page of Monday’s Sun-Times, not to conflate the two. And the Trib: “Outrage after toddler, teen die.” That sorta answers Hardiman’s question, doesn’t it?

To continue reading, click here. 

Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated, as usual

 

Investors in the Sun-Times are a low-profile group of civic-minded individuals

    Sure, I signed up for AARP — the American Association of Retired Persons — years ago, even though I wasn't retired and wasn't yet 60. The discounts alone seemed worth the pittance they charge for membership — or did, back when we, you know, went to restaurants and stayed in motels and stuff.  Plus they seem on the side of angels when it comes to lobbying for health care.
    They send out a sharp publication, the AARP Bulletin, printed on semi-glossy newsprint paper, the way certain trade publications used to. It has the brawny feel of Steel Pipe Quarterly or Chicken Husbandry World.
     That said, I don't fall eagerly upon the thing when it arrives. The June issue, "THE NEW NORMAL" sat around for a while. But I finally flipped it open Sunday.  

     I've been thinking about how the ongoing plague will affect society, long term. Money is gone, obviously, both in the sense of funds, and coins and paper money. We'll finally get Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill just in time for people to stop using currency entirely, the sort of cruel cosmic joke that America likes to play in these matters.
     "WHAT COMES NEXT" is subtitled "EXPERTS PREDICT HOW THE PANDEMIC WILL CHANGE OUR LIVES." Experts! Say no more. Although, I'd rather read a piece called "How experts are wrong about almost everything all the time."
     Still, pretty safe Sunday night reading. Our future seems to include lots of Purell but not many handshakes. 
    I can live with that. Then this popped up:

     "...digital media hasn't been kind to the newspaper and magazine biz, but COVID-19 could bury it. Gannett, the largest owner of local papers, lost nearly 94 percent of its value between August 2019 and April—much of that since mid-February. Media analyst Ken Doctor calls the pandemic 'an extinction event' for print, as newsstand sales, subscriptions and ad dollars shrivel, and beloved columnists you've been reading for years quietly disappear."

     Come again? What was that last part? As bad as it is to get an unexpected foreshadowing of doom, directed to you personally, it's even worse to get it in the AARP Bulletin. That's like flipping through the Vermont Country Store catalogue, wondering whether you'd really ever order the Brown Bread in a Can or the Chinese checkers set, only to turn a page and be confronted with, "Neil's Head on a Pike." Only $19.95. Very realistic looking.
     Not that I consider myself beloved. Far from it. Nor reviled, really. More unknown, ignored, not-thought-about-much and beside-the-point, like every other columnist for every other publication for the past decade or two.  I mean, I've got regular readers, thank God. But they don't love me. Okay, a few are obsessed in an unhealthy and probably pathological fashion. I wouldn't call that love. And though I read and appreciate certain columnists — Eric Zorn comes to mind. Or Leonard Pitts. Or S.E. Cupp. But I don't love them either.
    And quietly disappear?!? How is that new? When columnists go, quietly is pretty much the only option. Given the hook by death, yanked off stage as if by a string. Even those blowing up in the most dramatic exits — think Bob Greene — still go with the smallest poof. Really, it's like a gasoline storage facility on the far horizon exploding: a muffled ker-flump and a little mushroom of flame and smoke blossoms upward and vanishes. Replaced in 30 seconds by a sooty plume. "Oh look at that." Then a minute later, even that's gone. Nobody is clutching at the air where we've been nearly a quarter century later. That's only for Royko.  
      Hard as that is to take, it's even worse if we're still alive, and the exit is orderly enough to permit a final ave atque vale column. Usually, our supposedly poignant, thanks-for-the-memories good-bye to all our fans is also the greater general public's introduction to our existence. They look up at the flash of our self-immolation. A theatrical flourish, a deep bow, making twirls with your paired index and middle fingers, a few passionate kisses delivered to the mirror, then gone. Twitter serves up the goodbye of Arthur M. Blainford, the Rock of the Metro City Gazette for 47 years. Some black-and-white shot of him arm-wrestling with Kenny Loggins. And you think: who? Wha? Sorry pal, I somehow missed every single word you ever wrote plus the fact you were alive. I wish I could flatter myself that I won't appear that way to anyone who actually notices when my time comes but — spoiler alert! — I will.
      As for disappearing, you could argue that, with the internet, both nothing and everything disappears. Oh, everything you've ever written is there, swirling around in this snow globe of words the size of Jupiter. Accessible to anyone who wants it, 24 hours a day. Almost a mockery, since nobody knows and nobody cares, now that every single person is jabbering away full volume 24 hours a day. Columnists have already disappeared, lost in the constant roar. I wish I could convince myself otherwise but I can't. 
     So thank you AARP, thank you Ken Doctor, for alerting print to its demise.  Yes, these are tough times for the newspaper biz. And Napoleon has escaped from Elba. Both are not fake, but both are old news. Old, perennial news. Both are always the case. Print is always dying, ever since Johannes Gutenberg went bankrupt and lost his printing press. I've been saying that newspapering is like the M.C. Escher staircase that goes down and down and never reaches the bottom for a dozen years now. If not more. Didn't the Chicago Daily News — the best of Chicago's four newspapers, remember — crumple into dust in 1978? Remember where the Sun-Times came from: two newspapers, the Sun and the Times, joining forces to better survive. In 1947. 
      All sorts of media are declared dead all the time — Napster spelled doom for recorded music, remember? Only to somehow revive and endure. Not to contradict an expert like Ken Doctor, who was confidently predicting in 2012 that there was no economic reason that the Tribune would still be in business in 2015. But everyone's crystal ball is cloudy. The Trib is still here, last time I looked. Yes, arms bound behind her and in a tumbril heading to a wooden platform where Alden Capital is whetting a big double-sided axe. But not yet submitted to the fatal chop.
    Where there's life, as my people say, there's hope.
    Remember, we were doomed too. Cowering on the floor of some luxe Trump Tower condo at midnight as our owner Michael Ferro, doublet unloosed, advanced upon us, rubbing his hands together, jaws slavering, eyes aflame. 
    Yet we were saved at the last moment, spared that final despoilment. And now we've found a new home, and new friends, and things are snapping and popping once again at the Sun-Times.  Every time I look at the paper there are more reporters hired, unfamiliar names, new projects begun.  Our rescuers who galloped up and plucked us out of Ferro's clutches stand like a stone wall between us and the storm rattling the windows of journalism. Our owners, a confederation of labor unions, civic minded individuals and Chicagoans whose love for their city is only matched by their bottomless bank accounts, got together and decided to keep the scrappy newshound in kibble to prevent Chicago from becoming some eternally rainy Gotham City hellscape where all information is curated by Mark Zuckerberg.
    Sure, that could change in a day, or an hour, and you don't have to tell me that merely reporting a rosy outlook is asking for trouble, like a protester flipping off a cop off camera. But our credo is to call it like we see it and let the chips fall where they may, and that goes for good as well as bad. As somehow who has been through years when the paper was riding low in the water, waves crashing over the bow, star-flares exploding above the pitching deck, this feels like smooth sailing. COVID-19, the recession and the civic unrest has, as Ken Doctor said, made it harder to distribute the paper. People can no longer pick it up at newsstands that are no longer open on commutes they don't take to jobs they don't have. 
     But the news — credible, interesting, lively reportage of what's going on, plus thoughtful commentary from we liked-though-not-really-loved commentators — is more important than ever. We'll figure out how to keep it in your hands, somehow. 
     Things change. I bet there were plenty of folks in the cloth mask and hand sanitizer industries who were sitting around six months ago, glumly throwing cards into a hat and despairing whether business would ever pick up. It did. News is no different. Our time has come in the past and will come again. Until then, what is it Henry V says? "All things be ready if our minds be so." The times whir, and we whir with them, at least until the final curtain falls.

Mock trial parses contract conundrum

     “Any lane?” I asked the lifeguard last week, as I stood before the shimmering blue pool at the North Suburban YMCA.
     “Not many sign up this time of day,” she said, apologetically.
     The pool was completely empty. I felt like King Farouk.
     “It’s like a dream!” I gloated. “Except for the plague part.”
     It might say something about the mundane quality of my existence. But during months of lockdown, when I tried to look forward to the future, swimming laps at the Y was the first benchmark of the return of ordinary life.
     I kept paying dues, through April and May, even though the Y was closed. Because a) the Y rocks; b) I want the Y to survive — not all of them did; c) the dues aren’t that much — de minimis, as lawyers say; and d) I didn’t want to be what in legal circles is called “a jerk.”
     But let’s say I were a jerk. Let’s say I angrily demanded my dues back; only about 15% of members canceled, according to the Y. Would I get them? That would depend on the exact wording of the membership agreement, on what kind of force majeure clause it has.
     Force ma-what?
     “It’s a phrase that nobody knew about until three months ago, even among lawyers,” said Abbe Lowell, a top trial attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of Chicago’s Winston & Strawn.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2011: Genius lurks in the heart of every father

     Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's moving tribute to her father yesterday made me wonder what I had done to honor my own dear dad, this being Father's Day. I found this effort from 2011. I wouldn't call it a "moving tribute," necessarily. But like all sons, I did the best I could with the situation I found myself in.

     A father is far more important than his children, according to the Bible, someone worthy of automatic respect and complete obedience.
     My father, who turns 79 next month, is certainly more important than I, since I am a mere newspaper columnist, common as dirt, spouting our little opinions in every city and town, while he is an artistic genius who has created a radical new form of art which the world would have noticed long ago were the art community not in the thrall of charlatan dealers and flashy but untalented frauds.
     Today is Father’s Day, and since one should give his father the present that he really, truly wants, I thought I would pen a few paragraphs of recognition — or indulgence — that I’ve resisted writing for years.
     Is this perspective true? Heck, I don’t know. I have one of his paintings in my living room, and another in the dining room, and another in the hall. I don’t display them out of filial duty, entirely, but because they’re pretty and I like them and enjoy, when guests compliment them, saying, “My father painted that.”
     Whether that makes him the non plus ultra talent of the art world is another matter, one beyond my judging. I am biased and, as with most children, the bias cuts both ways. It isn’t always positive; like most children, I sometimes scoff. Perhaps this represents grudging acknowledgment of reality as I see it; perhaps it is my own mediocrity manifesting itself as jealousy of a greatness beyond my ken. I remember when my father wrote a paper on his art published in Leonardo, the journal of art and science — you can read the first page online by Googling “Robert Steinberg” and the title, “Self-Similar Structures that Amplify Natural Patterns within Paint, and the Feelings They Awaken in the Artist.”
     A mouthful, I know. But Leonardo is a prestigious journal — M.I.T Press publishes it. When that was printed, I turned to my brother and said, “Is it possible that we’re the idiot sons? That someday they’ll drag us in front of a camera for the NOVA special and we’ll have to admit that we sort of sniggered at him the whole time and never understood the important stuff he was trying to tell us?”
     So it is possible. Anyway, if my father taught me one thing in life, it is relentless pursuit of your goals. The man doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him. He was that way when he was 17 in the Bronx, writing certified letters to David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, trying to get himself aboard a ship as a radio operator, and he’s the same way now, hectoring the Museum of Modern Art to drop the scales from its eyes and stop obsessing over obvious fakes like Jeff Koons and turn its attention to the first dramatic advance in the art world since prehistoric men smeared images of bisons inside caves and urging his son to stop canoodling over meaningless drivel and focus on something significant, for a change.
     Credit where due. I could not be 51 years old and still rolling this stone uphill, still doing the shambling, groveling dance that a writer must do to get anything in print without having inherited his fierce, salmon-up-the-river-to-spawn ambition and stick-to-it-ness.
     So thanks Dad, and Happy Father’s Day. I hope this works. Though, as I told you previously, many times, I do not believe the doyens of the art world, whoever they are, read my column regularly, nor will they rush to elevate you to your rightful place in the pantheon of glory, wherever that is. But I didn’t want it to be because I didn’t give it my best shot, which is all a man can do in this life. You taught me that, Dad, and I appreciate it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times June 17, 2011

Texas Notes: Tony

     After kindly stepping aside last Saturday so I could honor my friend Kier, EGD Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey returns with this tribute to her father.

     Anthony Charles Jeskey is a good guy. He grew up under the shadow of the skyway on 95th and Commercial on Chicago’s southeast side where acrid poofs of smoke from nearby steel mills hung heavily and permeated the air. Loose dogs ran wild and terrified him and his brothers when they were kids running around in the tall prairie grasses of abandoned lots. His mother, my Grandma Marie, was a devout Catholic. Attendance at St. Patrick’s Church was mandatory for my father not just on Sundays, but on Wednesdays and Saturdays too. He became a good little alter boy, yet somehow I imagine him sneaking cigarettes and sips of sacramental wine when no one was looking. He had slicked back hair, a wiry frame, a handsome chiseled face and a glint in his eye. Today he calls himself a recovered Catholic.
     My dad is the eldest of three sons and became the man of the house when he was in his early 20s and his father died. When he learned of his father’s untimely death, leaving behind a wife, two teen sons and my father, he became distraught. The story goes like this: my father took a drive, lost control of his car and hit a tree head-on. He would not still be with us but an off-duty fireman — or maybe it was a policeman — was fortuitously behind him on the road that dark night and witnessed the crash. This stranger saved my father’s life and got him to the hospital for the 99 stitches that have left a scar from one end of his forehead to the other.
     No wonder this good-hearted, former filterless Camel smoking, ruggedly good looking greaser type won my mother’s heart, and I am so glad he did. They met soon after his father’s death at what was then Sully’s (now called the Hangge-Uppe), which was once a classy bar on Elm Street where folks generally went before and after the theater. My then single folks were probably there just to hang out with friends, no theater involved. Once he got my mother’s attention he worked hard to keep it. He’d spend all his money to rent fancy cars to pick her on the north side and take her on dates, fully ready in his early 20s to do all he could to woo a single mother and her young son (my half-brother) into his life. He succeeded. He asked her parents for permission and proposed after 8 months of dating with a ring he bought at Chicago’s Last Department Store. She said yes and they got married. She’d been married before so was not allowed to wear a white dress to St. Patrick’s on their wedding day due to an antiquated Catholic rule, but she sure looked stunning in a classy pale blue number.
     My mother and father put each other through school working long hours in difficult working-class jobs. My father earned degrees at the Illinois Institute of Technology and then the University of Chicago Business School and my mother graduated with honors from Mundelein (all women’s) College and then the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (also my alma mater).
     Tony filled the lives of my sister, brother and me with a sense of endless possibility and adventure. When I think back to how he swam around in pools with us on his back I marvel at the strength he must have had. My folks made sure to outfit us with skateboards, bicycles, S’mores, stilts, Weebles, Easy Bake ovens, Jiffy Pop, Big Wheels, summer camp, and hilarious vacations on a shoe-string budget. My father was always up to tossing a ball around, playing any game we wanted, putting our new toys together and fixing them when they broke. He happily poked holes into the tops of jars for us to keep the fireflies we captured before letting them go into the night. He’s the type of man who can fix or build anything.
     We were no stranger to summer vacations no matter how tight money got. There was the time we rented a huge unwieldy RV and a giant flying shrimp bug flew in the window of the driver’s cab. My siblings and I giggled in glee while my parents swatted at this strange and unusual creature as we careened down a highway somewhere between Chicago and an ocean somewhere. In our travels around the country we saw both oceans and countless national parks. We took a sleeper car on the Amtrak from Chicago to California. We met kids from all over the country at the myriad Yogi Bear campgrounds where we spent summer vacations when the sun never went down and mosquito bites kept us up all night. My parents gave us so much fun even though they must have been under a great deal of pressure trying to keep our struggling middle-class household going.
     My father always managed to make us feel that life was magical. The red light on the top of the Sears Tower was Rudolph's nose each Christmas Eve as we headed down Lake Shore Drive back to our north side home from Grandma Marie’s house on the south side. Our home was wildly decorated for every single holiday — Christmas, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, birthdays, even Bastille Day (“what’s that?” we’d ask year after year) and Easter. We were positive that the Easter Bunny existed just to bring us baskets of Whoppers and Peeps and giant chocolate bunnies from Gayety’s Chocolate and Ice Cream Shop (now located in Lansing IL, owned by a distant relative and as good as ever).
     I know Tony’s a good guy because I doubt almost anybody has a bad word to say about him. He provided for my mother and her son to the best of his ability, and then for us when we came along. He is the epitome of loyal, a solid and responsible man. He has always been quick to place a large bill into the palm of anyone in need, regardless of where his own finances happened to be in that moment. He shows up in every way imaginable. He tells his family “I love you” every chance he gets. He showed us the importance of family by loading us into the car time and time again for long trips to the far southern reaches of the city to pick up great uncles and grandmas and schlep them to the north side for graduations and every other excuse for a party imaginable. He is quick to smile and laugh and give out an encouraging word. He is well read and cultured and loves to succinctly share his thoughts and observations with his loved ones. He is a man of few words other than on topics that he is truly passionate about, such as social justice and ethical humanism. He was recently named the volunteer of the year for his work as a mentor and buddy to a young man in need of guidance, and now this young man is excelling. If we were Jewish I’d say my dad’s a mensch.
     Sure, he’s not perfect and we have had our differences. I am grateful to have had some very good psychoanalysis as well as garden-variety therapies and mentorship that have helped me individuate and see him as a person other than simply selfishly only as my father. The stories of our ups and downs are best reserved for more private settings. Now that this beast of a virus is among us it is imminently clear that my only jobs in relation to this man are to let him know how much I love him (I love you Dad), how grateful I am that he has taught me so well, and to enjoy his company on Zoom (since we live several states apart) and then again in person the first chance I can get.
     I’d like to write a poem about him but the essence of the father daughter dyad has been captured so often and well that a new poem seems redundant. “On the beach at night stands a child with her father, watching the east, the autumn sky,” says Walt Whitman in On The Beach At Night. We don’t need to know more as this image lets us know that the child feels safe with her little hand in her dad’s hand, and nothing more needs to be done than to simply stand there together.